Sometimes, it was Maureen, with her frustrations about the stagnation of their marriage - though there’s more to that story, which is slowly revealed over the course of the book.
Sometimes, Harold struck home, with his need to do something to feel productive. I completely empathized with all the characters in the book. What Harold doesn’t count on is how much his walk will change his life. And then just keeps walking.Ī girl in a garage inspires Harold: perhaps if he walks the 600 miles from his home in Kingsbridge to where Queenie is in Berwick-Upon-Tweed, perhaps she will live. When he gets a letter from Queenie Hennessy, a colleague he hasn’t seen in 20 years, that she’s dying of cancer, he sets out to mail a letter back to her. He doesn’t have much to do, and he and his wife, Maureen, haven’t had much of a marriage in 20 years. Joyce, a radio-dramatist turned novelist, is less sure-footed when attempting satire, and Harold's run-ins with film stars and assorted media folk are far less elegantly handled than her tender description of the kind Slovakian doctor who tends to Harold or the young girl in the petrol station who inadvertently makes him believe in himself.Harold Fry is 65 years old and has just retired from 45 years as a salesman at a local brewery.
At one point he attracts a growing band of fellow pilgrims and becomes the centre of a media storm.
Some are moved by his act, others bemused. Along the way he encounters many different people. There are Biblical overtones and elements of parable to Harold's story. Joyce's writing is clean and simple, at times deceptively so. She remembers her husband as he once was and everything he once meant to her. Without maps or waterproofs and only yachting shoes on his feet, he walks and walks, while his wife Maureen waits at home at first she is angered by what she perceives as abandonment but eventually his distance allows her emotions to resurface.
He believes that in some way his journey will help his friend to live. When Harold Fry, a timid man in his later years, discovers that a former friend and colleague is seriously ill, he sets out with the intention of posting her a letter but instead embarks on 600-mile walk from Devon to Berwick-upon-Tweed. T his Booker long-listed debut novel begins with the arrival of an unexpected letter and an impulsive act.
0 kommentar(er)
